Abstract

Crimes of everyday life, often referred to as unfair or unethical practices committed in the
marketplace by those who see themselves and are seen as respectable citizens, have
burgeoned in Europe as a result of the transformations in the economy in the late 20th
century. A ‘cornucopia of new criminal opportunities’ has given rise to a new range of
crimes such as ripping software, making false insurance claims or paying cash on hand to
circumvent taxes. These shady behaviours (legal or not) are part of people’s experience,
albeit they are collectively regarded as morally dubious. Taken collectively, crimes of
everyday life are indicators of the moral stage of a particular society and therefore a
valuable instrument for social and political analysis. This paper addresses the question of
whether and under which conditions feelings of economic hardship trigger crimes of
everyday life. The
empirical study relies on data from the second round of the European Social Survey (ESS, 2006) and
attempts to model, for each of the 23 countries, a formative measure of crimes of everyday life based
on socio-demographic variables and the feeling about household income. The resulting country-specific
regression coefficients are mapped onto the broader economic and normative context of the 23
European countries. The results reveal that crimes of everyday life are driven by feelings
of economic hardship only in countries where normative factors dictate their deviance. In
countries where fraudulent behaviour is more generalized, inner motivations to offend play
a secondary role. In these countries, more privileged consumers are more likely to commit fraud as they
interact more often with the market. In turn, normative aspects result from a dynamic
interplay between cultural and economic factors. As the economy grows faster, the tendency to
offend becomes stronger, but only in countries whose gross domestic product (GDP) stands above the European average. In countries with low GDP, the
normative landscape is shaped by cultural factors that seem to obfuscate the power of
economic factors favourable to consumer fraud.